What Faithful Means
by Elliot Pole
Summary: Isabella has a nightmare, but it's all good when she wakes up...until she sees Phineas with another girl.


Isabella was drowning….

"Phineas, save me!" she called to the boy with a triangular nose on the shore.

He didn't seem to hear her, and just before a wave came crashing over her to push her under, she saw him talking to a blond girl with much interest.

She kept hoping that Phineas would realize she was in danger and come rushing to save her at the last moment. But he didn't come, and she died.

Her soul was left to wander the Earth, and she attended her funeral. Her body had been badly mangled by the sea. It wasn't a pretty sight.

A teenage girl wearing Goth clothes went to the front to say a few words about her. "I did not know this little girl, but it is incredibly heart-breaking when one finds out a girl has died and will never know love because she hadn't lived long enough to experience it."

Phineas went up too, saying how fond he was of Isabella and how he would miss having her around at her house every day. Isabella hoped he would add that he loved her and he would die without her, but it didn't happen.

After the funeral, they went to the place where Isabella's body was to be buried. They had her favorite songs playing, and Phineas, Ferb, and their sister Candace sang their own song in honor of her. She started to cry…

Following Phineas and Ferb as they walked away from the others, Isabella was ceain that this would be the confession of Phineas' undying love for her…

"I let her drown," Phineas said. "She had asked one too many 'What'cha doing?'s I couldn't take it anymore. So I pretended to ignore her calls for my help when she swum too far out in the ocean, and I turned to talk to Clara Snivers."

Isabella could not keep the tears from flowing, not even stopping to wonder how she could cry if she didn't have a body anymore. She wept and wept for what felt like hours, but was much shorter.

"Pity," said a middle-aged female spirit to her companion, "that one didn't last long. Two minutes, wouldn't you say?"

"Not sure," said the companion, the spirit of a girl in her early twenties. "Certainly less than five. Well, that's what happens when ghosts find out that their true love has betrayed them. They cry themselves out of existence. Although she had already started crying at the burial site."

"Those were happy tears, dear. It is only the tears of love-loss that kill ghosts."

"Well, I'm thinking of showing myself to that cute blond boy that was at the funeral."

"No, don't! You'll end up the way this girl did! He's in love with the sister of the rotten boy that was responsible for the young girl's destruction."

But the young woman didn't listen. She went off to find the guy she admired, and when she did, she appeared to him in all her beauty. No one else could see her, and some people muttered at the strangeness of Jeremy talking to himself. Then Candace tapped him on the shoulder and pulled him in for a long, passionate kiss.

The young female ghost burst into unheard tears, except to the middle-aged ghost and Jeremy, for whom the sound was muffled because of Candace's kissing.

When Jeremy and Candace broke apart, the former said, "Hey, Canace, I'd like to meet…" He turned to the spot where he expected to see a girl. "Guess she's gone."

"Who? A she?" Candace asked, in a high-pitched voice.

"Just a new friend."

"A new _female_ friend," Candace said.

"Well, yeah, but she was just someone I met a moment ago. You're my girlfriend."

"Your _ex-_girlfriend," Candace said, storming off.

Jeremy ran after her, but a horse-driven hearse came in between them. When it had passed, Candace was gone.

The middle-aged ghost followed Candace to the top of a hill and watched as she curled herself into a ball and rolled down it.

A moment later, Candace's spirit had climbed up the hill.

"Hi," she said to the middle-aged ghost. "Guess I died, didn't I? Is this pain something that comes with being dead?"

"No, dear. The pain you feel was the cause of your deciding to take your life."

"Oh, right," Candace said. Then the tears burst out of her, and she vanished.

They found her body at the base of a tree, lifeless. She was buried within days of Isabella.

Jeremy went mad after Candace's funeral, doing crazy things like skating with his hands in the skates instead of his feet, and riding on the top of a bus while tied down. At last he went sky-diving with his Uncle Frederick, and he didn't figure out how to undo his parachute until it was too late.

A blond girl who had met Jeremy at a pool party went to look him up, only to find him dead. She took a few too many pills, and it was over for her.

A brunette who was in love with the above blond girl could not cope with the loss of the only girl she had ever loved, and had her sister put a gun to her face, telling the little girl that it was just a toy and instructing her on how to pull the trigger…

A never-ending cycle began, until it got to Phineas, who messed with one of Ferb's blueprints when he found Clara Snivers in the arms of a guy whose cousin had ended her life with the help of a voodoo witch. The blueprint mistake caused a fire-truck to fall on Phineas. (The invention they had made turned toy cars into full-size ones.)

Phineas' spirit met the middle-aged woman spirit briefly.

"I hope you are the last of these deaths," the woman said.

"Ma'am, do you know why there have been so many deaths in Danville recently?"

"Oh, I certainly do. All because a little boy allowed the girl who loved him to drown."

"What? Isabella?"

"Yes. She was the first to die, and then this whole chain started."

"Can you tell me where I can find her ghost so that I can ask for forgiveness?"

"Oh, her ghost is gone. She cried when she heard what you told Ferb after her funeral."

"But ghosts can't cry! They don't have tear ducts!"

"That is the point. It takes a very cold heart to make someone you love so upset that they cry without the necessary organs to do so."

"But…but…I didn't mean it!"

"Too late now, boy. And you're about to cry in despair, on so many accounts. I would be surprised if you lasted even a minute longer."

Phineas did began weeping, but he middle-aged woman was wrong. He lasted thirteen minutes.

Isabella woke up to the sound of her chihuahua's barking.

"Oh, Pinky, it's just you. And I'm alive and not a ghost who cried herself out of existence."

Pinky yipped and started running around in circles, causing Isabella to laugh.

She got dressed and walked across the street to Phineas' house. She was about to say her usual "What'cha doing?" when she saw that there was another girl in Phineas' backyard, talking to her man. She started to back away, when the other girl turned to the side and Isabella caught a glimpse of her face. Isabella gasped, because the other girl was…herself.


End file.
